Why I Don’t Like Bloodborne’s Nightmare Areas
So, I love Bloodborne. I love the Soulsborne games in general, but Bloodborne just really hits me in the aesthetics department; the visuals, the theming, the subtle horror. The game play is, likewise, fantastic, but today we’re going to focus on those aesthetics, because, while I do genuinely love this game, I have some problems with a couple choices that were made during development.
I find it incredibly difficult to pick a single “level” or area that I enjoy the most since there are just so many good ones. On the other hand, if someone were to ask me what my least favourite area is, I’d know how to respond immediately. The Nightmare Frontier sucks; it’s tedious to get through, it’s not very visually appealing (something about the colour scheme just puts me to sleep), if you go through that area online, you’re going to get ganked constantly, it has a poison swamp which slows you down even more, and Amygdala tends to use some cheap tactics, at least for me. The Frontier is just boring to me, and its one redeeming feature is that it’s completely optional.
But there’s one more thing about it that I despise and it’s how you get there. The Nightmare Frontier is only accessible via teleportation, but it’s not the sole area that does this. The Frontier, the Nightmare of Mensis, the Lecture Building, Castle Cainhurst, the Hunter’s Dream, and the DLC are all only accessible via teleportation. You can’t walk to any of these places, and it sucks...for most of them.
Before I go on, I want to explain why I dislike From Software’s use of teleportation in the Soulsborne games. The Soulsborne games are lauded for their settings. Demon’s Souls began the trend of environmental story-telling and Dark Souls introduced the concept of an interconnected world, and while large parts of Bloodborne’s world are interconnected, the few places that aren’t bring up a lot of questions that ruin immersion. To be clear, it’s not an issue that teleportation is used to expedite travel; Bloodborne is, first and foremost, a game, and the game would not be very fun if you had to walk EVERYWHERE, like from one side of the map to the next. Once you arrive in a location and find the lantern, lantern-to-lantern travel works perfectly fine. What’s not fine is being introduced to new locations via teleportation.
It is so much more satisfying when you stumble into a new area, whether you had an idea of where you were going or not. Exploration in the Soulsborne games is highly encouraged and often rewarded by the game itself; the developers want you to explore their world, and this is, in my opinion, part of their core philosophy. But when you’re teleported straight to where you need to go, you don’t get to explore, and you don’t get to feel like you’re really there, like it could all be a real place. You are reminded that this is a game and you’ve got places to be so you can finish it.
Having said this, some of the locations listed above do not break immersion, for various different reasons. Or they do, but not in egregious ways. The Frontier, Castle Cainhurst, and the DLC are all entirely optional; you don’t need to go to any of these places to complete the base game, the primary experience. If you were to skip these, you’d never experience their moments of teleportation, and the world would be, potentially, entirely interconnected. The use of teleportation keeps these challenge areas extra hidden and their discovery even more rewarding having solved the enigmatic series of hints given to you in-game (at least for Cainhurst and the DLC, although the DLC is far more direct). I also find the Hunter’s Dream excusable not only because it acts as your hub area where you are meant to feel safe away from the grim, violent waking world of Yharnam, but because of theming. I see a lot of people question why From decided to put two hubs, the Dream for leveling and Oedon Chapel for character side quests, but I think it was a wise decision in order to maintain the theme of questioning reality. The Dream is your introduction to questioning what is real and what isn’t, and it being so far removed that it exists as its own island in metaphysical space/time only furthers this theme. It is mandatory, therefore, that the Dream only be accessible via teleportation.
But the Lecture Building and Nightmare of Mensis are not optional areas, nor is it mandatory that they be accessible only via teleportation in order to maintain theming. To get to the end game, you need to get to Mensis, and to get to Mensis, you need to get to the Lecture Building, and you get to the Lecture Building by being teleported...via a mummified corpse. While it is spooky and mysterious, I feel like there was not enough lore build-up or pay-off to justify this imagery (the School of Mensis does not receive nearly enough attention). Given in-game clues, you can never guess that touching a seemingly random mummified corpse is going to send you to another plane of reality. It doesn’t even allow you to explore and find it as a “secret”, something the School of Mensis was trying to protect and keep hidden, since you are railroaded towards it as soon as you enter the building.
This brings up quite a few questions, but for me, none of them are about the mysterious mummified corpse, or how or why my character was brought to the Lecture Hall. Why didn’t they find a way to organically connect this part to the rest of the world? Is the game so big or the hardware so limited that loading screens are required for these areas? Were these areas created earlier in development only for From to turn around and realise they weren’t strictly necessary or in-line with the rest of the game’s aesthetic anymore, but they wanted to keep them anyways? Did From run into budgeting or time constraints? And while I understand that From Software employs people and not robots, and I shouldn’t be expecting perfection, these aren’t the questions I should be thinking of while playing a game so otherwise interconnected as Bloodborne. Frankly, it feels kind of lazy.
So, that’s the end of the analytical section of this post. Now, the game is done and over with, and at this point I’m complaining for no reason, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about possible ways that the Lecture Building and Nightmare of Mensis, at least, could have been better integrated...
Imagine defeating the One Reborn, and walking into the building and up to the mummified corpse. You inspect it for an item, something about the School of Mensis, something about nightmares (perhaps, in keeping with Lovecraft and themes of dreams and nightmares, a silver key), and head back out the way you came when an exit does not present itself. The arena seems untouched, but a little exploration reveals that one of the spiral staircases now extends down as well as up. As the only new path available to you, you descend the stairwell.
It goes down a bit further than you think it would or should, but you emerge on the other side into another section of Yahar’gul. The further you get into this new area, however, the more things start to get...weird. Groups of enemies start appearing that are mixes of Yahar’gul, the Cathedral Ward, Old Yharnam, and even the Forbidden Woods and Hemwick Charnel Lane. The setting does the same with ramshackle wooden houses sandwiched between the Victorian stone buildings, patches of twisted trees popping up from cobblestone roads littered with broken-down carriages. The area isn’t huge, but it doesn’t need to be. Your destination is a clearly academic building that resembles Byrgenwerth, at least in spirit.
The Lecture Building location becomes available, and it’s a bit bigger on the inside than as it is depicted now; a couple extra rooms, a couple extra hallways. The set of doors that would lead to the Frontier no longer open, but you reach the other set, open them, and are greeted with a passageway of strange rock. You continue through the short tunnel into the Nightmare of Mensis proper. It is very clear that it should not physically be possible for this area to be attached in any way to the Lecture Building and the rest of Yharnam. The area leading up to and including the Lecture Building were just the threshold, the first layer, and now you’ve stepped fully into the nightmare. Welcome to Mensis.
This concept not only maintains the philosophy of an interconnected world, but also transitions into the theme of dreams and nightmares present in the game. You walk into the nightmare, but do you really? When does the nightmare truly begin? When you step through from the Lecture Building? When you enter the Lecture Building itself? When you descend the spiral staircase? When you pick up the item? When you defeat Rom? When you first wake up in the clinic? It begs the question of whether or not you’ve been in a nightmare this whole time, an idea that, I believe, is brought up throughout the game and is especially present in the sunrise ending.
As for the Frontier, it could have been accessible via the currently unopenable hatch in Byrgenwerth, but only once the silver key has been obtained. Like with Mensis, a ladder could have brought you into a Lecture Building-esque area, perhaps even THE Lecture Building area, but now the Nightmare door doesn’t open and only the Frontier one does. The door opens onto a tunnel of strange rock and out into the Frontier proper. Perhaps, this is how Willem discovered the secret of “eyes on the inside”, from conversations with or at least studies of Amygdala? What inspired him to create Rom? It certainly opens up a few possibilities lore-wise.
In any case, the base game lacks some environmental interconnectivity, especially at the end, and while teleportation provides an easy solution, it does not provide a satisfying one.
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